William H. Calvin, a professor
at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle, is the author of 16 popular books on science,
mostly about brains, evolution, and climate change. They have been translated into 15 languages.
He won the Phi Beta Kappa book prize for science as literature.
His occasional magazine articles include an Atlantic Monthly cover story, "The Great Climate Flip-flop."
His most recent books, starting with Global Fever, are about global overheating and what to do about it.
The Great Climate Leap attempts a major reframing of how we view the climate threats.
Our biggest problem is no longer future emissions and climate creep;
it is the excess CO2 we already have and the climate leaps that have already begun.
The Great CO2 Cleanup undertakes a major reframing of what we should be doing about them:
a short-term massive cleanup of CO2 in addition to the emission reductions needed for the long term.
"We have three big problems-overheating, ocean acidification, and abrupt climate shifts. It's a triple threat.
Any menu of climate choices that ignores the second and third is a dangerous oversimplification.
We are indeed fortunate that one set of undo actions-cleaning up the excess CO2-will address all three."

Psychological factors are now playing a key role in our
failure to address the looming climate crisis. While
analyzing what's going on the psychology, I'll summarize the
climate science that's being denied, including the knock-on
consequences of global overheating that we're already
suffering from.

For physicians, the window of opportunity for intervening
successfully has become part of their training; they know
how fleeting an opportunity can be. So here's a "second
opinion" about the climate diagnosis, the prognosis if
untreated, and what treatments might actually fix the
climate problem—rather than merely delaying civilization's
collapse by a few decades.

Carbon sequestration
must be big and quick

This
what-to-do-about-it lecture (also available as a
podcast mp3)
for UW oceanography focuses on abrupt climate
changes since 1976, how to head off more, and
how to use the oceans to sequester enough
carbon. Several slides are for the experts, but
the rest is suitable for a general scientific
audience. Others familiar with the climate story
will be able to follow it as well.

A lecture for NASA's Green Series at the Langley Research
Center by Prof. William H. Calvin of the University of
Washington in Seattle.

Sea level is rising, heat waves are killing, oceans
acidifying, coral reefs bleaching, fisheries declining,
deserts expanding, and unfamiliar insects arriving.
Hurricanes are stronger. Each decade since 1950, there have
been more floods and more wildfires.

The climate doctors have been consulted; the lab reports
have come back. Now it's time to pull together the Big
Picture and discuss treatment options.

The diagnosis? The Earth is now dressed too warmly. We're
causing our planet to run a fever as we keep piling on those
invisible greenhouse-gas blankets generated by cutting down
forests, making cement, constantly tilling the soil,
spreading fertilizer, leaking natural gas, and—worst of
all—burning coal, oil, and natural gas.

A televised lecture on the climate crisis by William H.
Calvin, given in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing,
December 2007.

Thanks to upsetting our climate with a series of low-tech
practices such as cutting down forests, tilling the soil,
and—worst of all—burning fossil fuels, we are rapidly
approaching a use-it-or-lose-it intelligence test.

The outlook is for a higher fever, with droughts that just
won't quit. Extreme weather will keep trashing the place.
Tipping points will lead to demolition derbies, as when the
Amazon or Borneo rain forest burns, or a major city is
inundated.

Absent effective treatment of climate disease, the students
of today will face an unpleasant, chaotic future—not merely
hotter summers. Unless we get our act together very
quickly—the next ten years—and on a global scale, our legacy
could be genocidal downsizing.

Yet all we hear about is a low-carbon energy diet over the
decades: conserve energy, emphasiz...
more

The Gothenburg lecture by William H. Calvin, a professor at
the University of Washington in Seattle.

The beyond-the-apes story starts about 7 million years ago.
To understand the emergence of mind -- and particularly the
higher aspects of consciousness that so set us apart from
the rest of the animal kingdom -- we need to understand what
the great apes are capable of. And what they don't do.

It is just in the last 1 percent of that up-from-the-apes
period that human creativity and technological capabilities
have really blossomed. It's been called "The Mind's Big
Bang." In our usual expansive sense of "mind," the history
of the mind is surprisingly brief, certainly when compared
with the long increase in brain size and the halting march
of tool making. What came before was not, as we usually
assume, a series of increasing approximations to the modern
mind. So what set the stage for this creative explosion?
We tend to see ourselves as the...
more

Shocks and Instabilities:
Climate is like a drunk.
If left alone, it sits.
Forced to move, it staggers.

Coming on stage now is a stunning example of how civilization must
rescue itself. It dwarfs the three big scientific alerts from the
1970s about global warming, ozone loss, and acid rain. But until the
1990s, no one knew much about abrupt climate change, those past
occasions when the whole world flipped out of a warm-and-wet climate
like today’s into the alternate mode, which is like a worldwide
version of the Oklahoma Dust Bowl of the 1930s. There are big
alterations in only 3-5 years. A few centuries later, the drought
climate flips back into worldwide warm-and-wet, even more quickly.
Unlike greenhouse warmings, the big flips have happened every few
thousand years on average, though the most recent one was back
before agriculture in 10,000 B.C. The next flip may arrive sooner
than otherwise, thanks to our current warming trend. The northern
extension of the Gulf Stream appears quite vulnerable to global
warming in four different ways. An early warning might be a decline
in this current. And according to two oceanographic studies
published this last year, this vulnerable ocean current has been
dramatically declining for the last 40-50 years, paralleling our
global warming and rising CO2.

The 2004 version of this talk, for the Adamson Annual Lecture on
International Studies, is
here.

The Evolution of Human Minds:
The Ice Age Emergence of Higher Intellectual Functions
The suite of higher intellectual functions includes syntax,
multi-stage planning, structured music, chains of logic, games with
arbitrary rules, and our fondness for discovering hidden patterns
(the search for coherence). It's likely that they share some neural
machinery for handling structure and judging coherence. But the
archeological record suggests that they are late-comers -- that the
three-fold enlargement of the ape brain into the human brain was
complete about 150,000 years ago, but that they were intensely
conservative, doing little that Neanderthals didn’t do as well. The
"behaviorally modern" aspects were seldom seen before the Creative
Explosion about 50,000 years ago. So the big brain is not all about
intellect. What happened to reorganize the brain after 100,000 years
at its present size, to make it more creative and versatile, back
during the middle of the most recent ice age?

The version of this talk for WCBR 2005 is available as webbed
slides with narration.

Think Ahead (But How?)How do we generate on-the-fly novelty of high quality? Which we do every time we speak a sentence that
we’ve never spoken before. Or a contingent plan for the weekend, an alternative in case it rains.
We are often right the first time, even when novel. So HOW do we weed out the nonsense? Gradually improve our plan? Avoid getting stuck? Recognize a coherent answer, the perfect fit to our current situation?
The Dusseldorf lecture.

Cerebral Circuits for Creativity:
Bootstrapping Coherence using a Darwin Machine
The problem with creativity is not in putting together novel
mixtures – a little confusion may suffice – but in managing the
incoherence. Things often don’t hang together properly – as in our
night­time dreams, full of people, places, and occasions that don’t
fit together very well. What sort of on-the-fly process does it take
to convert such an incoherent mix into a coherent compound, whether
it be an on-target movement program or a novel sentence to speak
aloud? The bootstrapping of new ideas works much like the immune
response or the evolution of a new animal species — except that the
neocortical brain circuitry can turn the Darwinian crank a lot
faster, on the time scale of thought and action. Few proposals
achieve a Perfect Ten when judged against our memories, but we can
subconsciously try out variations, using this Darwin Machine for
copying competitions among cerebral codes. Eventually, as quality
improves, we become conscious of our new invention. It's probably
the source of our fascination with discovering hidden order, with
imagining how things hang together, seen in getting the joke or
doing science.

The version of this for Stanford University is available as
webbed
slides.

Planning ballistic movements as an
evolutionary setup for syntax

For slow movements, progress reports can update the plan and correct
an approximate intention. But for ballistic movements that are
over-and-done in 1/8 sec, the feedback is too slow to correct the
movement; you have to make the perfect plan during get set.
We know that our ancestors were eating a lot of meat by about 1.8
million years ago. They had probably figured out how to bring down
big grazing animals, and with regularity. But accurate throwing (as
opposed to, say, the chimp’s fling of a branch) is a difficult task
for the brain. During “get set” one must improvise an
appropriate-to-the-target orchestration of a hundred muscles and
then execute the plan without feedback. While there are hundreds of
ways to throw that would hit a particular target, they are hidden
amidst millions of wrong answers, any one of which would cause
dinner to run away. Planning it right the first time, rather than
trying over and over, has real advantages. Just use the ballistic
movement planning circuits for other similar tasks in the spare
time. And what fits are the novel structured tasks of higher
intellectual function, such as syntax, contingent plans, polyphonic
music, getting the joke, and our search for how things all hang
together (seen in crossword puzzles and in doing science). Yes, some
of them “pay their own way” subsequently, but the free lunch seems
to be alive and well in the brain, where novel secondary uses
abound.

Talk at ZiF,
Universität Bielefeld interdisciplinary conference on "Emotions
as Bio-Cultural Processes," is the latest version of what happened
50,000 years ago and the potential for a Second Mind's Big Bang.